How to download big databases of Lichess

Hello,

Is ther anyone who could explain me how to download big databases of Lichess ?

Luc

Hi!

The monthly database dumps with the game PGNs are available for download at https://database.lichess.org/
Each file covers one month of PGNs. There are many games each month, so they are big (like 20GB each).
They are compressed with zst format, and the page contains advice on which tools you can use to extract the PGNs.

Chess on!

@Chess_Gambit_for_fun
https://database.lichess.org/
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/datasnaek/chess

or if you want specific games, you can use the lichess API
import lichess.api

game_id = "ABCDEFGH" # Replace with the ID of the game you want to retrieve
game_data = lichess.api.game(game_id)

# Extract PGN
pgn = game_data["moves"]

Thanks a lot for your help ! Luc

Okay, so you should just bypass the Lichess Open Database and go to the Lichess Elite Database:
https://database.nikonoel.fr/

If instead you want to try for each full month at the open db, then each download will unzip to about 200 GB, meaning you'll need, in the end, about 400 GB of space on your hard drive, though I can't remember why. You can then use PGN Split:
https://github.com/cyanfish/pgnsplit

That's a vital program, because you can choose to make each section smaller than 5 GB, meaning you can make each section openable in Scid.

(Generally speaking, 1 game = 1k, and 5 GB = 5,000,000. That's the actual limit. Five million.)